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email: tonykim991@gmail.com

The professor is funny and cute. He explains topics clearly and tests are fair. Wanna take his class again!!

I agree with the other positive reviews. Professor Shlyakhtenko was a fantastic professor, and his lectures were entertaining and informative. He was easy to understand, both in his speech and in the language he used to explain material.

We had one question quizzes in discussion sections each week in lieu of homework assignments, though he does post recommended problem sets on the website. I would highly suggest doing the problems and using the textbook thoroughly.

His lectures can be proof heavy at times. Because of this, I would highly recommend working ahead in the homework before the lecture on that topic. It's easier to understand why we're deriving something if you are familiar with the end goal. Also, he sometimes includes a challenge problem on his midterms that are just basic concepts from a future chapter. If you do this, you will succeed in this class.

The midterms and finals were very manageable. He provides practice exams about a week before each one, the difficulty level of which are typically higher than anything on the tests themselves. So, if you're comfortable with the material in the practice exams, you'll be well prepared.

I would take this professor again!

Professor Shlyakhtenko was honestly the best math professor I have had at UCLA. I really enjoyed going to his lectures because he was very entertaining and was obviously very passionate about the subject. He is also very friendly and quirky, which always made the class more fun to attend.
Regarding homework/exams, the homework was "assigned" weekly but they were never due. Instead of homework, we had weekly quizzes during our discussion sections. The quizzes were very manageable since they were only one question long and it just covered one of the concepts we learned that week. If you do the homework, the quizzes are completely doable. My TA was Jaehoon Lee and he was pretty good at reviewing the concepts and prepping us for the quizzes beforehand as well.
The midterms and final were also very fair. He doesn't like to release class averages, so I'm not sure how everyone else did, but I received a 94% on the first midterm , a 92% on the second midterm, and a 98% on the final exam. The difficulty levels were very reasonable, and he gave us a variety of practice problems to help us prepare for the final exam which I thought were pretty helpful as well.
Overall, I really enjoyed the subject matter and am really grateful to have had such an incredible professor. I HIGHLY recommend Shlyakhtenko for linear algebra (or any other math class, as I'm sure he's probably great in those too).

Good lecturer. I went to about 60% of the lectures, but lecture is definitely not required. The books is pretty good, and he lectures right out of the book while adding in quirky examples and humor. It is very easy to teach yourself this whole course out of the text. Homework was manageable, certainly less time-consuming than that which his wife Prof. Radko. A good TA will do wonders, go to each of the TAs discussion sections over the first three weeks, decide which is your favorite, and go to that one. Both midterms and the final were about where everyone was expecting in terms of difficulty, although note that it is extremely difficult to finish the midterms within the 50 minutes, so don't take your time with those. I ended up getting a 98% on the first midterm (avg. 70), 70% on the second midterm (avg. 63), and 70% on the final (avg. 73) and got a B+ in the class.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Shlyakhtenko. I took 33a with him and ended up getting an A, but I had to do a decent amount of studying and practice problems and also lucked out with an incredible TA. It's hard to tell if the difficulty in the course was the fault of Shlyakhtenko or the course itself. I really really didn't like 33a. The material was boring and towards the end of the quarter it was hard to pay attention. Although that is mostly my fault, I felt that Shlyakhtenko didn't do enough to make the class interesting and oftentimes would get caught up in these proofs and multiple explanations of the same concept so that when you were in class it was hard to tell what was important and what was unnecessary. Looking back through my notes with a better understanding, however, I was pleased with what he did give me because I knew what was important. In terms of his tests, I didn't think that they were really that bad. He usually has a T/F section followed by a few questions, about half of which are computation and process questions while the other half are more conceptual proofs/tricky questions that test understanding. He gives useless practice midterms with no answers but if you look online you can find his past exams with answers written out that are VERY similar to his tests. Overall I'd recommend taking Shlyakhtenko because he does explain the material and doesn't screw you over if you hold up your end.

33A was VERY VERY hard. I really wished I had taken Neeman over this professor. I don't like Shlyakhtenko's lecture style. He explained topics very fast and not in a thorough way. I was confused the entire quarter. However, I will say this: the way he teaches 33A reflects what needs to be done in 115A. He expects a lot of proofs for his class, not so much computations, and that is what will be done in 115A. I never learned the proofs. Sometimes it wasn't covered in the book, and sometimes he'd tell us to think about how to prove it, so I just never learned those proofs. If you're not engineering/math major material, I wouldn't suggest taking him, since my quarter taking 33A was an absolute horror.